Or so Emily imagined it. Gazing into a mirror, absentmindedly plucking her eyebrows, the disorder on her brow, Emily removed as much of the present as she could. The piano teacher is sitting beside her now on the soft chair she liked so much, her clothes like a garden that needs tending. Full of color and the smell of violets, Hilda’s mouth is slightly open and she is smiling as Emily plays, not too badly, a Bach exercise. As Emily finishes the piece without a mistake, Hilda is almost triumphant. No mistakes. The forest across the street appears, seen again as it was during every lesson. With longing. Her own eyebrows and Hilda’s clothes now resonant of Richard II with those gardening metaphors for bad governing. No mistakes. We can’t make any mistakes. How can I avoid them? Her eyes close and Hilda fades reluctantly and again she wonders where she is right now and.
Part IV
Chapter 10
Remember walking on the sidewalk and jumping over the cracks, and if you lose your balance, if you step on one, something terrible will happen to you. Walking a fine line invisible to anyone but herself, Jane dropped out of college and got a job at Macy’s, in the toy department, where she expected never to see anyone she knew. She was living with her sister again, eating whole wheat donuts for lunch and finishing boxes of chocolate cookies for dinner. Home was a room that was too empty. The chair was uncomfortable. The air smelled bad, like a new apartment, although it wasn’t. The shower didn’t have enough pressure. Next door an alcoholic couple screamed into the night. Jane watched television and wrote in her diary.
If I loved somebody I wouldn’t feel like this. Or if somebody loved me. Sometimes I feel there’s no difference between my body and this chair I’m sitting in. In a funny way I don’t think I exist. Not really. Things just seem to go on and on, with and without me, mostly without me.
Her father’s family, Larry insisted, was full of lively, dramatic people. Melodramatic maybe. The facts about her father’s family were, Jane supposed, not unusual. They arrived in this country and couldn’t speak the language. The oldest brother, born in Russia, escaped on foot, crossing a river on his uncle’s back. The two younger brothers — they are a family of sons — Larry and Marty, her father, were born in America. The family had escaped so that the men wouldn’t have to fight in the Czar’s army. There are then three sons, a flamboyant, perhaps mad mother and a benign father who doesn’t live with them. Kicked out. Or lives with them sometimes. He visits once a week. They cohabit, Larry puts it, once a week. Still, the mother advertises for a husband in the Yiddish newspapers, which none of the sons can read. They are not taught the language, nor are they bar mitzvahed. It’s early in the twentieth century and they want to be Americans. No one knows what an American is and across the Atlantic Gertrude Stein is working on that very problem. But they wouldn’t know this.
From her view behind the Barbie doll counter Christmas was a TV series of family conflicts. A little girl points her finger at a Barbie doll outfit and her mother points to another. “Don’t you want this one?” The little girl looks at the other one. She starts to want both. She can’t make up her mind. Her mother gets angry. “Just choose one. You can’t have them both.” Close up on the child’s face, just about to cry. They buy the one the mother wanted.
The floor supervisor, a young dark-haired man, wears a white boutonniere as all the supervisors do. Some of the salespeople have worked at Macy’s ten (red flower) or twenty (white flower) years. The saleswomen remind Jane of sturdy ships that sail into and out of harbor, the fifth floor, resignation their port of call. Resignation keeps her alert to resignation. Frank, the floor supervisor, flirts with her, giving her knowing, we-shouldn’t-be-working-here looks to which she responds coyly. She decides he’s the one. He will be the man, not Jimmy. She knows him too well, and anyway, he’s just a child. He’s also too skinny.
Grandma Rose wears her hair piled on top of her head. It’s a big mess, always falling down, the combs slipping out. She’s constantly raising her hands to her head to push them back in and it’s always futile. She married her husband in Russia quickly, after the son of the lord who owned the land they worked took a liking to her and wanted to kiss her hand. She gave him her hand but wouldn’t take off her glove because he was a Christian. She was supposed to have been beautiful. Jane tried to imagine her grandmother, who later covered newspapers with towels and bits of cloth to keep the people in the pictures warm, extending a gloved hand to the lord’s son. The two images could be placed side by side, but could not be superimposed to make a whole, and looking from one to the other was like reading two different languages in the same sentence when you don’t know one of them. When she arrived in America, New York, she was a young woman with a husband and child. They lived on the Lower East Side. Larry and Marty are born on Ludlow Street.
Sam Wo’s is not far from the Lower East Side. As usual it’s crowded and as usual Felix was pricking certain ideas that he had said littered the landscape. In his way he was much more romantic than Jane, but not about love, about life, which he wanted to experience madly. Madness bored Jane. She didn’t think that mad people were so great or so beautiful. Felix could talk to her about Artaud until he himself got locked up, she would resist these insights. My grandmother was mad, she told him, but you wouldn’t have wanted to spend time with her. Felix wouldn’t tell Jane anything about his family because his father was a famous artist and he thought that would make a difference. “Why should it make a difference to me?” she insisted. “I don’t want to be an artist.” “It might make a difference to Jimmy,” Felix said. Maybe Jimmy, she considered, he takes his heroes so seriously.
Everything Jimmy read conspired to equip him with outrageous notions about men, himself. Kerouac cut into the heroic grand figure but created another type, the one Jimmy aspired to. Then there was Bob Dylan. If he’d been born in the Midwest, and not Long Island, Jimmy might have had a chance to be either one of those guys. As a European, Felix argued against the tyranny of influence, of tradition, while Jimmy, an American, perceived nothing except for what he chose as influence. And Jane sat between them, stationed in the balance, drinking coffee in Ukrainian restaurants. Their arguments were often about the ineffable and she found herself speechless in the face of Felix’s libertarian absoluteness and Jimmy’s veiled masculine strivings. It was enough to be aware and that, like the Salk vaccine, would protect one from false hope, from bullshit. Jane listened as if from very far away. It seemed to have nothing to do with her.
She tried to visualize her father when he was a little boy. Hazel-eyed, with thick black hair, small for his age, he’s sent by his mother to find coal in the dark basement that may have rats in it. He’s terrified of rats and the dark basement. Being sent there by his mother was terrible, a descent into a children’s hell, the hellish imagination that grows wild when not tended. He was his mother’s favorite, Larry says, and very guilty about it. Is fear catching? Is guilt? Jane wanted to understand the patterns as eccentricities or commonplaces, to understand the ties between siblings and parents, between siblings and each other. She and her sisters, her father and his brothers. Her mother rarely talks about her family except to say that her own mother was perfect. The children of that mother don’t seem to like each other nearly as much as Larry and Marty do, their tie is remarkable, unending, intangible, in the blood, Larry says.